freeman of the land

A year and a bit ago, I published a post on a guy called Roger Hayes, who runs the British Constitution Group, which is dedicated to pretending that our current legal system contravenes the legal system that went before it and it’s therefore illegal, and that why they shouldn’t have to pay council tax.

Then Roger Hayes tried not to pay his council tax, and the court he didn’t recognise imprisoned him. A bunch of his followers went apeshit and claimed that this was an attempt by the British government to silence the truth of their illegitimacy and operate a secret trial system to suppress political dissidents.

This story kept showing up in my Facebook news feed because I am friends with a bunch of people who a) believe in the legalisation of cannabis who also b) believe in a whole bunch of other things like aliens building the pyramids, vaccines, sugar and aeroplane vapour trails containing poison, and putting “of the name” before your surname means somehow the law doesn’t apply to you anymore.

I therefore wrote to Wirral Council to ask them the background to this story in an effort to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Their reply, that Roger Hayes had experienced exactly the same judicial process that every non-council taxpayer does, was then published on my website here. The comments on this article are some of the craziest stuff I have ever read. People seem unable to decide whether council tax is illegal, unfair or optional, they just know that I am definitely, definitely wrong. On what I am wrong, they are also unclear.

Last month, the comments started up again in earnest, about how I’m really wrong and selfish because I think it’s a good idea to pay public sector worker’s pensions etc. Today, someone called Tom posted about how I’ve been censoring comments because they were unable to post twice and this was evidently due to me deleting their comments, as well as repeatedly calling my blog “idiotic”. [click to continue…]